It’s probably no great surprise that once again the BSides 2018 Badge is also a PCB.

However most people don’t get the chance to have fun with their badges until the get home, but as this years badge is all about interaction, SBG have teamed up with BSidesLeeds to help you actually take part on the day.

What you need?

The heart of the badge is a LoRa ESP32 Board. These were originally designed by Heltec as “ESP32 OLED LoRa Development Boards” intended for IoT device/sensor development. For this badge, an original or any of its 23mm pitch pin-compatible copies are fine.

You can get them much cheaper of Ali Express, but to get them in time for the conference and if you’re an Amazon Prime customer you can get them from here (though any board with a compatible pin-out is likely to work)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B078M74NNN

You then need need something to act as a keyboard interface and power source, a laptop works fine with a USB cable works fine, but we’re sure some of you will come up with inventive alternatives.

It would be nice to solder them on the day, but the venue doesn’t allow for that, so the good new is, you can actually get it working without the board.

Then what?

The easy way? Just turn up to the SBG Firmware Flashing Station (located in the <insert place> with your LoRa board and we’ll drop @LargeCardinal’s custom firmware on it, pass you some info <link tbc> on how to hook it up to a PC/Mac/Linux box and let the magic begin.

Easy as that!

However, if you want to do it all yourself, see this guide <link tbc>